Thursday, October 23, 2008

More cupcakes, and a cake. And life.

Today I made a birthday cake and Caramel Apple cupcakes- cupcakes with little pieces of apple in them dipped in gooey caramel. Pretty much delicious.

Amanda was visiting, and Sarah was around because she lives here- they were both tired and I fed them a lot of sugar, so it was pretty fun.

The birthday cake turned out really well, purple and green frosting, with little star sprinkles that Sarah found in the cupboard.

Life!

I have my second group critique of senior show work next Thursday. I wish I had more done, but I plan on churning out quite a bit of work this week. I did three sculptures last week, the first was destroyed, and I made two out of that clay. They turned out really well, but my batteries were dead in my camera and now I've taken them to my storage space on campus. I'll post soon about my concept for my show and hopefully put pictures of works in progress.

On the social side of my life, since I'm still looking for a job I have quite a bit of free time. I've been spending quite a bit of time with Jillian, which is really great. I like her a lot. We're in similar places in our lives right now, and we have so much more in common than I thought we did. It's been very nice. I've also had coffee with Brian a few times in the past month. That's been nice too, I'm glad that we can be friends. James and I have also been spending increasing amounts of time together, which is good. That's the nice thing about old friendships, there's enough of a basis there to just pick back up. And of course I've been spending a lot of time with my sister Amanda and her kitty, Zipper.

Life in general is kind of weird right now. I'm going part time, so I'm almost never on campus. I don't have any particular time to be up because my earliest class is at 3 in the afternoon on Tuesday and Thursday, and my other two classes are Wednesday and Thursday nights. I don't work very often, and when I do, it's usually weekend nights at the CLC, or for a few days during the week with the gallery, and that's only about once a month. I have my artwork, which is nice to be able to focus on, and nice to have a lot of time to spend on it, but I don't feel like I'm doing as much as I could be. Bennett said that we should be working harder right now than we ever have been, and I think that's true- I'm just having trouble with my starter it seems. When I do get to work, I work hard and deeply for a long time, it just seems I find myself sleeping more than I mean to most days and getting distracted really easily. I feel like I'm turning into a housecat.

I think that a lot of it is because of my massive lack of structure. I live off campus so I make my own food and can eat whenever I want, I don't have to abide by the dining hall hours. This is good most of the time, but I find myself eating breakfast at 11 and lunch at 4, and dinner is iffy, sometimes happening at 9, or 6 or whenever someone offers me dinner or I am inspired to cook. Sometimes I just pull out some cheese and vegetables and bread and have a picnic standing at the kitchen counter. I'd really like to get a job (especially since I'm quite low on funds at the moment), but part of me wants to take advantage of the ample time I have only spending six to eight hours in class a week to throw myself into my work. Maybe I'm just lazy and don't want to have to take the effort to budget my time. But the other half of me thinks that if I had a part time job at least, I'd have structure and I'd be more productive. But then, it seems like I should be able to just implement structure in my own life, but that is for some reason so much harder than it should be. I've never been good at scheduling personal time.

I basically feel like I bounce along my week in antigravity, floating through the clouds doing little things but not accomplishing much, spending a few hours here and there with friends, but not really being in community with them. It's like everything is falling apart and coming back together all at once, and in slow motion. I'm happier than I've been in a long time, and have more reasons to be happy than I have, but I don't feel there is much that is tangible, and like I'm reaching and not able to grasp my life. I seem to just be kind of confused. I'll stop rambling now.